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Welcome

Welcome to Saved by Science, where we'll be exploring a Humanist perspective on improving our world.

What is Humanism? You can find a full description here, but in simple terms, Humanism is a life philosophy that embraces reality and encourages compassion - and who could possibly be against that? Who would adopt cruelty over kindness and irrationality over clear, crisp thinking?

With regard to the former, I suspect the large majority of people genuinely believe their acting with kindness, even if their behavior would suggest otherwise to an objective, third party. As for clear, crisp thinking - that, unfortunately, is not one of our strong suits, because our brains didn't evolve in order to generate truth.Rather, brains which led to more progeny tended to be selected for, and that means we have all sorts of fascinating biases, heuristics, and susceptibilities built in to the three pounds of wrinkly neural matter riding about inside our skulls.

Now that we're getting a better feel for how the brain works, however, and how religion and other rigid ideologies can exploits its frailties, we can employ critical thinking to make wiser decisions about everything, from how set our policies to how we conduct our lives. Indeed, not only can we change how we think, but now that we've become a global civilization with the capacity to ravage every ecosystem on the planet, we need to change, and quickly, otherwise we'll be damning future generations to a needlessly hostile environment. Thinking critically isn't an esoteric nicety to be practiced by students of philosophy; it's an ethical responsibility that should be embraced by us all.